Doctor Who anniversary: 12 ways to become a Time Lord

The world's longest-running science fiction show has its 50th anniversary on 23 November. In case you don't know, it concerns a 900-year-old alien humanoid known as the Doctor, who travels through space and time in a vehicle called the Tardis. Oh yes, and he has the ability to regenerate 12 times, according to legend, each time in a different body. To mark the occasion, we line up the fiction with reality

During some incarnations of the Doctor's life – did we mention that he periodically regenerates into a different body? – he has a loyal robotic dog, called K-9.

The dog on television might have had a laser, but it was limited to trundling around on wheels. Boston Dynamics of Waltham, Massachusetts, has a much better artificial canine, dubbed BigDog, that can run on four legs and even recover from a stumble. If you prefer cats, the company also has a faster bot, Cheetah, which can reach speeds of nearly 30 kilometres per hour.

4. "It's bigger on the inside!"

It's rare for anyone to enter the Tardis for the first time without uttering some variation of the above phrase. From the outside, the Doctor's time machine appears to be a wooden Police telephone box, similar to those seen in 1960s London. But on the inside… it is vast. Perhaps infinite. Surely it's not possible to squeeze an infinite space inside a small blue box? Well, it sort of is, with a little help from a virtual reality headset. Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria have created a simulator that generates endless rooms and corridors. The device tricks users into walking around a much smaller space in the real world by making them turn before they hit a wall.

Tom Baker (Image: Michael Putland/Getty)

5. Home of the Time Lords

In the original run of the TV show, Gallifrey, the Doctor's home planet, was one of a number of worlds orbiting a binary star system, though its whereabouts have varied since Doctor Who returned to the small screen in 2005. At the moment we only know of a single binary star system with multiple orbiting planets. Last year astronomers announced the discovery of Kepler-47b, a planet three times the width of Earth, and its neighbour 47c, a gas giant. The latter is in the system's habitable zone, where temperatures are right for liquid water, so Time Lords could lurk on any of moons orbiting the planet.

Matt Smith(Image: Polly Thomas/REX)

6. Pick a card, any card

The Doctor sometimes uses a handy gizmo he calls psychic paper – it looks like an ordinary blank card, but when the Doctor presents it to someone, they see it printed with whatever he wants them to. Useful when he's caught in places he's not supposed to be. You can get a similar effect by employing the choice blindness illusion, a psychological experiment in which volunteers are asked to pick one of two options, such as selecting the more attractive of two faces, and justify their choice. When the experimenter uses a card trick to secretly swap their choice, 75 per cent of people don't notice it is the complete opposite of their original preference.

However, Voyager 1 is going rather too slowly to reach another star anytime soon. If we want to travel to the stars, we will need much faster propulsion methods than chemical rockets. That might mean ramjets that gather fuel from deep space as they travel, powerful fusion rockets, or something nobody has thought of yet.

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